Emerging Technologies

Last year for a presentation at Drupalcamp Atlanta I conducted some research on the social media software space and how Drupal fits.  Since as a business professor I have access to Gartner and Forrester as well as a variety of other marketing research resources, I used those.  I also surveyed former clients and students now using social media.  Since I have been installing and using such softwares for 15 years, I have a history of working with SharePoint, Documentum, LotusNotes, MicroStrategy, Drupal, Moodle, E107, and several others.  I attempted to be objective.  Here are the results.

First, there are three core capabilities I think social software really needs.  After I go through these and present charts of my findings, I will present three charts comparing several solutions at the bundle level for blog publishing, social media, and content management. 

This week Bill Gates noted that we need better modeling tools for software in order to solve some of the persistent and hardest problems facing the planet. I agree, but I would suggest to him that we not only need better tools. We also need better concepts and techniques for modeling. Som research on modeling human-machine systems by my friend Andrew has indicated that modeling techniques still lack meaningful representation in complex systems [1]. I have reviewed a number of papers this year analyzing Gantt charts and their capacity to improve project management. In each case, Gantt charts tend to get used as eye candy with no impact on improving project outcomes. The idea is to have a representation a group can use to jointly visualize complex data and understand it [2], but these current representations are still inadequate. So, simply making software that add digitizations of current concepts will not be enough. We need new concepts.

I am marking this space to begin collecting my thoughts on the Age of Design. Future Shock, Network Nation, and Megatrends all predicted the information age. People would become information-empowered.  

The Internet connects people today and offers access to pricing, regulations, other government and public documents, as well as tools for manipulating data and producing more information.

 I do not want to pronounce the immanent failure of a site just as it is getting launched, but I am concerned about the prospects for Woofertime (Woofing rather than Tweeting, get it?).  The idea is that you must write 1400 words to post.  Hmm... looks mighty similar to Tweeter...